Habits.. changes

I've personally wrestled a lot with changing myself - certain behaviour - bringing better ones.
Change is always difficult but unless we change, life remains stagnant.

There is no transformation. Every day starts to look the same.
But when we bring in changes, we notice freshness. We anticipate life.

I have heard about Charles Duhigg from R. I read up a bit and it sounded neat.
Then came Ms Gretchen's whole book - Better than before.
So, yesterday I read a little more about habits.
I keep reminding myself about a few key points. I try to bring in changes but they do not stick long.
This time around I want to make positive changes. Else I'm done.
So, I scoured the internet for some tips. Why is it so hard to change?

The road to failure is paved with good intentions.

I read about the success of implementation intentions (http://jamesclear.com/implementation-intentions),
http://jamesclear.com/three-steps-habit-change
http://www.success.com/article/tiny-habits

Important things:

1) Pick things that are easy. Make it so simple that you will definitely do it. You should arrange the world around you to make your new habit easy to do.
Simplicity changes behavior.
2) Easy means, you do not depend on motivation. Well, motivation is not very reliable, going up and down, often unpredictably. And it often takes a lot of work to sustain motivation. In the end, I’ve concluded that relying on motivation to create a habit doesn’t work. 
3) Tiny Habits are designed to be on a schedule -- they come after an existing habit. This existing habit should be something you always do, or it’s a cue that always happens in your daily life. I call the existing habit or cue an “anchor.” In my method, you use your existing anchor to trigger the new tiny behavior you want. 

4) You need to celebrate your success.

Because you are reinforcing yourself.

The stronger you feel a positive emotion after your Tiny Habit, the faster it will become automatic in your life. “Our brains are very bad at distinguishing between I did this huge thing and I’m feeling awesome about it and I did this tiny thing and I’m still feeling awesome about it,” Fogg says. “Somehow in our heads we exaggerate, which is a good thing. That’s part of the hack—building success momentum, allowing yourself to feel successful, allowing that success to be larger than it rationally should be, then growing and leveraging that attitude into bigger things.”

5) It’s important that you not feel pain when you do your new habit.

Because if you feel pain, your brain will find ways to avoid the behavior in the future. In contrast, if you feel happy after you do the behavior, then your brain will remind you to do it again in the future.
We avoid pain and we seek pleasure.

6) Perhaps more helpful than the tiny habits themselves is the success momentum they build. There’s a snowball effect: When you achieve a goal by integrating simple daily habits into your life, no matter how small, you gain a confidence that helps pave the way to reach bigger goals. The success momentum you gain from creating positive habits is the method’s secret sauce.

Every time a company convinces you to try its new health platform and you don’t succeed, you come back worse. The only way to make behavior changes that actually work is through tiny steps, performed patiently and methodically.

“When you [create a habit], you’re signaling to yourself, Yes! I can change my behavior. I’m doing it right now! You’re telling yourself this at least once a day. Just have patience, keep going and don’t give up.”

“I think every good business is about helping people do what they already want to do,” Fogg says. “That’s what we’re figuring out: What do people want to do and how do we make it simple for them to do it? That’s one of the things I teach a lot now to my students—help people do what they already want to do.”

Somehow I had realized a few of these myself over the last 2 years. Things should be so easy that you can not not do it. 

Also, don't pick things that u can fail in, coz success triggers more success - testosterone effect.

But didn't know that even small success counts so big-ly.

And..  I was always punishing myself for not being inspired and motivated.

No, no one.. not even the greatest artists got through 365 days with just motivation. They relied on habits. We need to automate some part of our work. When we've spent like 10000 hours, lightning strikes, even with automated work!.

Managing our emotions is key. Emotional resilience is extremely important to us sensitive souls.

We should, to start with, avoid any suckers.. avoid paths of failures.. avoid difficult people, till we become strong. No point falling before the 10th step, right? Though not a good formula, this is all we've got. We want to maximise success. If all we want to so is build emotional resilience then we could get the most difficult people every day.. but if that is not the end goal, save some heartache..choose a path which has least resistance.. which offers better prospects of success.